Catheters are used in a variety of medical procedures. In some applications, these devices provide physicians the ability to explore, operate, and insert drugs/medical devices in various reaches of the anatomy without invasive surgery. Oftentimes, the catheters have medical devices mounted on the catheter shaft. For example, an electrophysiological (EP) ablation catheter has an ablation electrode mounted at a distal tip of the catheter. In another application, guiding catheters are used to create an easily navigable pathway to be used for delivery of various payloads such as drugs, therapeutic/diagnostic devices (e.g., EP mapping and ablation electrodes), and implantable devices (e.g., cardiac pacing/defibrillation leads).
Guiding catheter systems are typically configured with a profile that is optimized for the intended method of access. For example, when trying to access the coronary sinus of a patient's heart, one method is to enter the venous system through an incision at a large vein such as the subclavian vein near the shoulder. A guiding catheter is inserted through this incision and is sent in an arced path through the superior vena cava into the right atrium of the heart. From the right atrium, the ostium of the coronary sinus must be located. A catheter with a distal contour including a relatively sharp bend will point the catheter towards the likely location of the coronary sinus once the right atrium is reached. The contours of pre-shaped guiding catheters are often fixed during manufacture.
A pre-shaped guiding catheter is sometimes used to blindly locate the coronary sinus ostium. This endeavor, however, is complicated by the fact that the location of the coronary sinus ostium may vary appreciably from one patient to another, especially among patients with diseased hearts. If the pre-shaped catheter is introduced and found to be not well adapted to the patient's anatomy, the catheter must be removed and a replaced with a catheter having a different shape. Replacing a catheter in this manner is time consuming, expensive, and can cause unnecessary trauma to the patient.
Even when the catheter has an ideal shape for a given application, the size and flexibility of the catheter that provides maneuverability through a convoluted access path becomes a disadvantage when trying to manipulate the distal end of the catheter in the right atrium. Further, once the catheter has cannulated the destination vessel, the flexible distal tip may be dislodged from the destination vessel due to shape distortions caused by introducing a payload through the catheter.
The primary objective of a typical guiding catheter procedure is to locate and cannulate a vessel of interest in the least amount of time. Finding and cannulating the coronary sinus, for example, can become a time consuming, trial and error procedure even in a healthy patient. Patients exhibiting symptoms of advanced heart disease can have blockages or deformations of heart structure, further complicating the task of locating the ostium of the coronary sinus.
There is a need for an improved guiding catheter that provides for more efficient access to vessels of interest, such as the coronary sinus. There is a further need for a catheter that can be positively secured in a cannulated destination vessel. The present invention fulfills these and other needs, and addresses other deficiencies of prior art implementations and techniques.